When Mountain Dew gave me the opportunity to head down to Orlando, Florida for two days to learn how to ride bikes with professional BMX riders Chad DeGroot and Mark Mulville, I couldn’t shirk off the responsibilities of fatherhood, home ownership and general employment fast enough.

Kickstart by Mountain Dew is a sparkling juice beverage made to kick-start your day and get your rear into gear. With just 80 calories per 16 oz serving and 92 milligrams of caffeine (roughly as much as one cup of coffee), Kickstart gets you moving without the bloated, heavy feeling supplied by most “energy drinks” on the market. Don’t think of this as an energy drink — think of it as Mountain Dew for breakfast! Didn’t we all go to school with someone who drank Mountain Dew for breakfast, anyway? My buddy Eric Hoffman drank so much in the ’90s he pisses Yellow #5 to this day, exclusively.

Speaking of OSP, (which is what you call it, Brojam), getting there at roughly 7 AM was a serious thing of beauty. The sun had just began to rise, which gave everything a cherubic, surreal glow, and was accompanied by an endless chorus of early morning bird chirping action. It was like a bird mixtape that you made to impress a chick (when you used to do shit like that), except this was played against the backdrop of crisp morning air and the excitement of doing something you had never done before: riding a BMX bike.

When I first attempted to straddle the BMX, my first concern was for my nutsac. I’m all vasectomied up, so I wasn’t worried about reproductive function being compromised (spray and pray, baby); I was literally worried about crushing my nutsac on the pointy plastic seat. When I asked pro rider Chad DeGroot about the protruding seat, which could tear anal membrane or ball sac-age with equal ease, he said, “Well, you really don’t have to worry because you’re usually standing when you’re on the bike, anyway.”

And with that, I mounted the bike from behind, and rode it, in a rather wobbly way for about 10-15 feet. The bike was really small, my legs felt super long, and the safety of my ballsac was still floating through my mind. Maybe it’s because when I was 13 and playing little league I watched a kid in the on-deck circle take a well hit, yet foul, line drive directly to the nuts which resulted in one of his balls deflating, right there on the field. What a sound!